'Cursed if I know what she was. I rammed a cake of good Trinidad
tobacco into my boot when I saw her. I've seen the inside of a French
prison before now. Give way, Bill, and have it over.'

A minute later, with a low grating sound, we ran aground upon a gravelly
leach. My bundle was thrown ashore, I stepped after it, and a seaman
pushed the prow off again, springing in as his comrade backed her into
deep water. Already the glow in the west had vanished, the storm-cloud
was half up the heavens, and a thick blackness had gathered over the
ocean. As I turned to watch the vanishing boat a keen wet blast flapped
in my face, and the air was filled with the high piping of the wind and
with the deep thunder of the sea.

And thus it was that, on a wild evening in the early spring of the year
1805, I, Louis de Laval, being in the twenty-first year of my age,
returned, after an exile of thirteen years, to the country of which my
family had for many centuries been the ornament and support. She had
treated us badly, this country; she had repaid our services by insult,
exile, and confiscation. But all that was forgotten as I, the only de
Laval of the new generation, dropped upon my knees upon her sacred soil,
and, with the strong smell of the seaweed in my nostrils, pressed my
lips upon the wet and pringling gravel.



CHAPTER II


THE SALT-MARSH